The Semantics of the Future by Bridget Lynn Copley B.A. Linguistics Yale University, 1996 Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY September 2002 c Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2002. All rights reserved. Author . Department of Linguistics and Philosophy August 28, 2002 Certified by. Sabine Iatridou Professor of Linguistics Thesis Supervisor Accepted by . Alec Marantz Professor of Linguistics Head, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy The Semantics of the Future by Bridget Lynn Copley Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy on August 28, 2002, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics ABSTRACT Natural languages use a number of different methods to refer to future eventualities: among them are futurates, as in (1a), and futures, as in (1b) and (1c). (1) a. The Red Sox (are) play(ing) the Yankees tomorrow. b. We'll change your oil in Madera. c. We're going to change your oil in Madera. This dissertation uses evidence primarily from English, with additional data from Turkish and Indonesian, to argue that these methods all involve universal quantification over subsets of metaphysically accessible futures. One factor in determining which worlds a modal quantifies over is the temporal argument of the modal's accessibility relation. It is well-known that a higher tense affects the accessibility relation of modals. What is not well-known is that there are aspectual operators high enough to affect the accessibility relation of modals. New data presented in this dissertation reveal the presence of aspectual operators located between TP and the future modal projection. The effects of these operators on truth and assertability conditions provide substantial information about the correct characterization of future modality, and indeed of modality in general. Furthermore, the very existence of such aspectual operators raises questions about how aspect is represented in the semantics, if, as is generally assumed, aspectual operators take event arguments, which do not occur outside of the verb phrase. In addition, the ordering source in futures is found to be determined in some cases by animate entities' abilities and commitments (bouletic ordering sources), and in other cases by more general properties of the world (inertial ordering sources). Since other modals in other languages seem to share this property, a unification of the two kinds of ordering sources is proposed. Thesis Supervisor: Sabine Iatridou Title: Professor of Linguistics 2 Acknowledgments Futurism | The Trendiest Profession -Newsweek headline, March 2, 1998 On my family's very first computer, a Tandy TRS-80 that we got in 1982, there was a program called \dissertation." When you typed in run dissertation, the screen would scroll a lot of gobbledegook that could only be stopped by hitting the break key. I thought this was fascinating. It was second only to making the computer sound like it was falling down the stairs by typing individual letters into the primitive speech synthesis program, another favorite pastime. But the result of this was that for a number of years I thought that the word dissertation actually meant `a lot of gobbledegook'. I see now that I was not entirely wrong. But to the extent that any part of this particular dissertation fails to be gobbledegook, the following people are to thank. I have been lucky to have had Sabine Iatridou as my committee chair. She is blessed with stunningly precise aspectual and modal intuitions, and a great gift for making them all lie flat. She has consistently militated against gobbledegook in my thinking and in my prose. She has encouraged me to trust my instincts. More than anything, throughout this process she constantly and vociferously expressed her belief in me, in a tone that brooked no dissent. Speaking of dissent, I have been privileged to learn first-hand that Noam Chomsky is as brilliant as they say. He has an unwillingness to take assumptions for granted, an unwillingness that has had a big impact on this dissertation. I have been both helped and inspired by Noam's compassion, his optimism, and his voracious interest in things that he does not personally work on. I sometimes forget that in his spare time he is famous. Kai von Fintel must think in lambda notation. I am so thankful that he does not tolerate sloppy math, because I am sloppy by nature and I wasn't going to get anywhere without writing everything down correctly. Kai was also very patient with my futurate obsession early on, when I'm sure he just wished I would settle down with a nice quantifier scope problem instead. Finally, I am grateful to Kai for curtailing his sabbatical this summer to be on my committee. Irene Heim often seems to know what I am getting at, even when I don't myself know. I have no idea how she can be so quick. It blows my mind. I also have no idea how she read and commented on all the dissertations she graciously agreed to read and comment on this summer, and I'm just glad that mine could be one of them. I might have asked Norvin Richards (the syntactician, not the ethicist, though the ethicist is a nice guy too) to be on my committee, were it not for the fact that he is a dear friend. As a syntactician, he has answered my questions at all hours of the day and night. As an Algonquianist, he has made me glad that I do not work on Algonquian languages. And as a chocolate aficionado, he has provided all of us with M&Ms; I know I join others in the department in expressing thanks from the bottom of my stomach. Someone else who I would have wanted to ask to be on my committee was Ken Hale. His passing last fall was a cruel loss in a season of cruel loss. Ken taught me so much, by his 3 own example more than anything, about how to do theoretical work on minority languages, while respecting the people who speak them. His boundless kindness and many talents are legendary. Like everyone else who knew him, I miss him tremendously. A great number of other people were directly involved in the research that led to this dissertation. Various people either read and commented on partial drafts, or let me talk at them at length: Nuel Belnap, Gennaro Chierchia, Cleo Condoravdi, Mike Dickey, Danny Fox, Heidi Harley, Patrick Hawley, Michela Ippolito, Angelika Kratzer, Chris Pinon,~ Barry Schein, Philippe Schlenker, Bob Stalnaker, and participants at the 2000 UMass- UConn-MIT semantics workshop, SALT XI, NELS 32 and 33, the UiL-OTS Perspectives on Aspect conference, and the Harvard Light Verb Workshop. The dissertation bene- fitted greatly from their insights. Robert Binnick's comprehensive online bibliographies (http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/binnic~ k/TENSE/BIBLIO.html) were immensely helpful as well. Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye, Becky Marshall, and Elena Guerzoni all lent me their editorial expertise on part or all of the text, for which I am grateful (you should be too). Thanks as well to Cristina Cuervo and Linnaea Stockall at MITWPL. This dissertation would have been quite short without data. I have been lucky enough to work with many astute consultants, both linguists and non-linguists. By language, they are: Eric Albert, Joseph “Jofish” Kaye, Sharon Teitlebaum, and too many speakers at MIT to thank here (English); Sabine Iatridou (Greek); Wendy Ham, Yonathan Thio, Diana Yuliyanti, and Natanael Perangin (Indonesian); Ken Hiraiwa, Toshiyaki Inada, Shinichiro Ishihara, Kimiko Nakanishi, Shigeru Miyagawa, and Shogo Suzuki (Japanese, and while we're on the topic I'd like to thank my Japanese teachers, senseis Nagaya, Yamamoto, Ikei, and Hatano); Albert Alvarez and Ofelia Zepeta (Tohono O'odham); and Meltem Kelepir and Gulsat¨ Aygen (Turkish). A number of other academic types had a more indirect but no less important impact on this research. The people I began graduate school with, as ling-96, are wonderful folks and helped me get through a lot of this: Calixto Aguero, Sveva Besana, Meltem Kelepir, Cornelia Krause, Vivian Lin, Jay Rifkin, and Sonny Vu. The people I ended graduate school with are also wonderful, and helped me nurture my last remaining shreds of sanity; Karlos Arregi, Elissa Flagg, Michela Ippolito, Vivian Lin, and Andrea Rackowski. I will not be able to recall or even alphabetize the large number of linguists at and around MIT that have had a positive impact on my graduate education. In, I swear, no particular order, I would like to thank Alec Marantz, Shigeru Miyagawa, Cheryl Zoll, Danny Fox, Morris Halle, Michael Kenstowicz, David Pesetsky, Michel DeGraff, Wayne O'Neil, Maya Honda, Martha McGinnis, Patrick Hawley, Orin Percus, Uli Sauerland, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Kai Yasa, Ben Bruening, Paul Elbourne, Liina Pylkk¨anen, Elena Guerzoni, Martin Hackl, Jon Nussenbaum, Chris Bader, Paul Hagstrom, Philippe Schlenker, Idan Landau, Lance Nathan, Teal Bissell, Julie Legate, Cristina Cuervo, and the six or eight people whot I will ∗ wake up in the middle of the night realizing that I forgot to thank t. Linguistics and language folks from elsewhere who were of great help include Mike Terry at UMass, and Andrew Carnie, Heidi Harley, Sheilah Nicholas, Rachel LaMantia, Jasper Kingsley, Albert Alvarez, Terry Langendoen, Mary Ann Willie, Jayne Cookman, and Ofelia 4 Zepeda at the University of Arizona. In my previous life before graduate school, I had a lot of fantastic teachers. When I began at Yale, I thought I might want to major in linguistics, and Larry Horn's classes were so intriguing that I did, despite the threats on the part of the administration to shut down the department entirely.